Introduction to Latinx
Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial
Rebellion Co-edited with Victor Valle
(U of Nebraska P., 2018)
For the printed version, click here
Introduction
Ignacio
López-Calvo and Victor Valle
Decolonizing Latina/o
non-fiction urban writing
In 1995, Raymund A. Paredes, a career UCLA English professor
who would eventually assume a position of prominence within the Texas education
policy apparatus,[1]
delivered an appraisal of Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt
of the Cockroach People that contrasted the novel’s accomplishments to its nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Latina/o literary predecessors. In building his
comparison, however, he effectively
stranded the nineteenth-century crónicas
on a temporal island when he pointed out that Los Angeles Mexican-American
writing “dates from the 1850s, when El Clamor Público and other local
Spanish-language newspapers began to publish poems and fictional sketches, some
of which treated aspects of Los Angeles life. But these works are of limited
interest and the fact remains that extended fictional works about Los Angeles
by Mexican-American authors did not appear until the 1970s” (240-41). Clearly, Paredes’s
oversight betrayed a perceptual blindness that resulted from his early
privileging of the published Chicano poetry and even the corrido’s oral lyric forms (1978: 82 and 1985: 1088). But Paredes,
who had found El Clamor’s poetry wanting,
had failed to consider the possibility that the masterful defenses of Mexican
civil rights Francisco Ramírez published in Spanish could be interpreted as
literary performances that arguably surpassed Acosta’s command of English. Whether
he intended it or not, his broad brush also ignored the blistering and eloquent
critiques of U.S. imperialism and monopoly capitalism a handful of Mexican
anarchists had penned and published in early twentieth century Los Angeles. As
Victor Valle argues in the anthology’s second critical essay, Paredes’s bias in
favor of the fictional text recruited the seemingly invisible high/low genre
dichotomies that have helped to maintain Latina/o non-fiction’s literary exile
in the humanities.
Despite the multi-faceted techniques that
disguise these disappearing effects, the threats they posed to this
marginalizing system are not so hard to grasp. The authors of this extremely
varied non-fiction literature have, at different times, recorded and denounced
the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinas/os that have restricted
or denied their claims to U.S. citizenship. At other times, these writers, most
notably its early twentieth-century anarchist authors, have challenged the
imposition of national borders as nothing more than corporate capital’s tried-and-true
method for securing cheaper labor. Starting in the 1970s, Latina and Chicana feminist
and gay non-fiction authors would begin a new tangent series of literary
interventions that traced their embodied experiences of exclusion to the
artifice of arbitrary national borders. Their celebrations and defenses of gay
sexuality would eventually lead to an explicit critique of the categories of
gender, racial, and class difference that had marginalized their writing within
and without the Latino community, and, from their questioning of socially
constructed borders, theorizations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as that
interstitial space where the boundaries of difference were erased or violated.
Their critiques cut in multiple directions–against the nation state that had
relegated them, as children of or members of the working class, to the status
of second-class or non-citizens, and against the 1960s male Chicano cultural
nationalism that re-cycled colonial era and Mexican nationalist narratives of
gender and gay difference, to sketch out the boundaries of their “heterosexist
monopoly on the construction of Chicana/o identity” (Hernandez 70). The 1970s explosion
of non-fiction Latina writing that transgressed the genre boundaries of the
essay, memoir, cultural theory, and poetry was echoed in a different register by
veteran Chicano writer-organizers. Formed in that period of radical left
politics that spanned the Mexican Revolution to the mass labor mobilizations of
the 1930s, these supportive though critical participant-observers noted that
the early Chicano movement’s emphasis upon a minority identity politics would
eventually exhaust its generation’s youthful energy and require a critique that
recognized the emergence of Latina/o working class urban majorities.[2]
Meanwhile, a new generation of Chicana/o artist cadres such as ASCO
experimented with a variety of expressive forms, including subversive interpretations
of non-fiction narrative, which explored and validated the spectrum of non-conforming
Latina/o subjectivities, from gay to transgender and more, increasingly performed
in the city’s cosmopolitan spaces. All of these tendencies–the critique of
racial, gender, sexual, class, and national boundaries–eventually displaced
Chicana/o cultural nationalism and opened up a space for a dialogue focused on the
intersections of transnationalism, globalization, and cultural hybridity in the
neoliberal city.
The texts
included in this collection can therefore be read as a geology of a contested
urban present which, in challenging the uncritical, untheorized, or disjointed
descriptions that kept this literature’s sprawling, rarely-understood matrix of
texts into the shadows, now requires a fresh reading of the literature’s historical
and literary precursors, their spatial and temporal domains, beginning with the
seventeenth-century Spanish crónicas de
conquista and cartas de relación,
written during the conquest of the North American southwest en route to
California. But this critical effort’s trajectory cannot be traced without
first challenging the assumption that this literature appeared ready-made, and that
its texts must be triangulated in relation to the literatures of “objectivity”
that have dominated the development of U.S. English-language journalism, and not
the much older works of Hispanophone literature that have periodically crystalized
in U.S. Latino non-fiction. Indeed, we find many of the predecessors of U.S.
Latina/o non-fiction in the crónicas de
conquista and cartas de relación written
by colonial explorers and conquistadors who tried to present their adventures
as fruitful investments for the Spanish crown or other potential sponsors.
Using all the available rhetorical devices, including hyperbole, they depicted
the so-called “New World” as a perfect opportunity for conquering new souls for
the Catholic Church and collecting riches (particularly spices, gold, and
silver) for the Empire, but also a questioning of these purposes.
Álvar Núñez
Cabeza de Vaca’s (c. 1488-c.1558) Naufragios
(Shipwreck), a Spanish-language crónica of his incredible trek through today’s
Southeastern and Southwestern United States (1542), illustrates this critical
tendency by inconveniently documenting his expedition’s failed toma de posesión (land takeover) and the
astounding scale of an unintended genocide he witnessed on his decade-long trek
back from today’s Florida to what was then northern New Spain. In spite of the
subjectivity that characterizes the genre, Cabeza de Vaca’s crónica declares
the veracity of the facts he is relating in what is now considered the first
historical narration, not to mention survival story/travelogue, written about
today’s United States. Like U.S. Latina/o authors who today write non-fiction
to assert truth claims that remind the reader of the text’s objective moorings,
the naming and narration with which Cabeza de Vaca symbolically laid claim to
the land he “discovered” also relied upon the genre’s implicit truth claims. Cabeza
de Vaca wrote his testimony to apologize for the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition’s
1527 shipwreck in what is now Tampa, Florida, to verify his truth claims by
reminding readers of the narrative’s mimetic correspondence to an external material
and/or internal subjective reality. Likewise, the Franciscan
Friar Junípero Serra (1713-1784), who founded nine Franciscan missions in
California between 1769 and 1782, and Father Juan Crespi, who chronicled these
expeditions from today’s San Diego to San Franscisco, recruited the form to convince
their royal and religious sponsors in Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Madrid of
the project’s success. The
awe-inspiring or terrifying sense of scale of the Cabeza de Vaca adventure and
Serra’s epic of foundation will surface again in the larger-than-life scales of
the early twentieth-century anarchist cronistas
and memoirs of the Mexican Revolution. The anarchist’s deadly confrontation
with monopoly capitalism occurs at transatlantic and transnational scales while
a boy soldier’s recollections of revolution is staged in the vastness of the
Chihuahuan wilderness in which he struggled to survive the horrors of combat,
thirst and starvation.
To
recognize the mimetic in Latina/o literature’s colonial legacy does not,
however, preclude the possibility that its non-fiction current also carries entire
cities of spectral voices in its current. For in adopting European literacy, the
literature also questioned and subverted the West’s dominant representational
paradigm: mimesis. The Hispanic literary archive is not, in this sense, that
different from the hemisphere’s English-language literature: both have marginalized
testimonies of the
hemisphere’s indigenous, as well as African and Asian diasporic non-fiction
writers, who have deployed the power of the Derridian “re-mark,” those literary
gestures that remind the reader they are reading a “true” story, to voice their
criticisms (Morton: 48). We refer here to the handful of European
chroniclers of genocide, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, who documented the eradication of
the Caribbean’s Taino and Carib populations, and the seventeenth-century
anonymous scribe who chronicled in Nahuatl a strike of indigenous bakers that
prevented a handful of Spaniards from monopolizing the baking industry in New
Spain’s Puebla de Los Angeles. These inconvenient voices would make themselves
audible again in the twentieth century when, for example, Chicana/o memoirists challenged
Father Junípero Serra’s now officially beatified image as a benevolent
civilizer with their own memories of a patronizing and often violent mission
system that precipitated the near complete collapse of California’s original
native populations. These voices of negation have not only turned non-fiction’s
mimetic authority against the capitalist colonizing epic in the Americas, they have
also invoked the fragmented, though persistent echoes of pre-Hispanic knowledge
in the present. Pre-Hispanic writing systems and literary forms, which expressed
their radically different ideas about the purposes narrative chronology, also found
its way into the Hispanic archive. Whether encoded in the circa 1600 Cuauhtinchan
Map No. 2’s narrative imaging of a native lineage’s claim to local political
authority (Boone 28) tribute registers, numerous migration myth/chronicles, and
indigenous chronicles of the Spanish conquest, Mesoamerica’s rich history of
writing periodically surfaced to question colonial authority and assert its ways
of knowing in writing systems that fused pictorial imaging, iconic abstraction,
phonetic reproduction, and mathematical calculation. These critical voices also
persisted as questioning ghosts in the sixteenth-century writing instruments Friars
Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán taught to their Nahua scribes in their
efforts to effect more efficient and permanent conversions; they echoed in the shamanic
incantation the colonizers did not understand or thought too trivial to police.
And it re-appears in Anzaldúa’s
non-fiction narrative, Borderlands/La
Frontera, when she imagined the pre-Hispanic shaman’s underworld journey as
a ritual for inhabiting the trance states in which she experiences her death
and re-birth into a bodily awareness of her “New Mestiza” identity (Carrasco
and Sagarena 231-32 ). Subsequent theorizations of embodiment allow us to
understand how her literary performance of the trance drew directly from the
Mesoamerican cosmology’s understanding of the human body as a ritual event (and
not an object) made flesh by the convergence of cosmic and accidental forces (Marcos
371, 376-77). Here, the performance of space-making strives to evoke an
atmosphere in which we gain awareness of the embodiment of our sensations. As
in shamanic practice, the literary effort to bring the awareness of embodied
experience into the foreground depends upon a spatializing poetics of
synesthesia (Morton: 165). In the poetics of synesthesia, the hearing flavors
or touching sounds signals a moment of rupture; it tells us we have left the
everyday behind, where the environment is merely the background, and entered
into another space of heightened possibilities in which formerly ignored
borderlands contradictions and paradoxes come into awareness. Walter Mignolo
argues that the performative space Anzaldúa invents represents
a major theoretical achievement because it opens the positionality of an
in-between space “from
where to think rather than a hybrid space to talk about, a hybrid thinking‑space
of Spanish / Latin American and Amerindian legacies as the condition of
possibility for Spanish / Latin American and Amerindian postcolonial theories”
(xiii). A
few Latina/o authors would follow through with Anzaldúa’s movement toward an
aesthetic of embodiment with non-fiction narratives of non-mimetic performance that
explore alternative possibilities of being and acting in a neoliberal
globalized world. For example, anthology contributors, Harry
Gamboa Jr. and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, reinvent the 19th century flâneur in their performances of postmodern Chicano sensibility. Whereas the
19th century flaneur chronicled
urban fashion, parlor manners, and café society with a bourgeoisie condescending
gaze, Gómez-Peña invents the persona of the “border brujo” who chronicles the juxtapositions,
ironies, and radical hybridity of the deterritorialized global metropolis it
inhabits to subvert the hegemony of mimetic narrative and grant empirical
grounding to the performances of his subjective truth. Both of these
writer/performers also make their interpretive frameworks explicit, a major faut pas for conventional literary
journalism or the novel, which ask their readers to deduce the author’s ideas
from the interplay of narrative and characters. Instead, they unsettle the
naturalness of mimetic narration with rapid fluctuations between personal
essay, memoir, conceptual performance, and manifesto. Charting
the spectral voices flowing through Latina/o non-fiction literature, however, had
lacked an epistemology of its borderlands spaces.
Among the
critics who have attempted it is José David Saldívar, whose 1991
essay collection, The Dialectics of Our
America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History, established
three principles for a critical genealogy of Latina/o non-fiction. First, he challenged
the additive logic of the neoliberal multiculturalist agenda by arguing that
simply adding texts of racialized and gendered Others to the national literary
cannon would not be enough to reform the “American” exceptionalism that
colonized and domesticated their meanings. Instead, the discourse of “America”
itself, he argued, would have to be questioned before the so-called minority
(therefore peripheral) literatures could become fully visible, audible and legible.
Second, Saldívar’s revisionist reframing turned to José Martí’s landmark,
anti-imperialist crónica-manifesto “Nuestra
América” (“Our America”) for its re-imagining of cosmopolitan decolonial spaces.
Taking Anzaldúa’s lead, Saldívar identified the borderlands as the name of that
imaginary and actual place from which its texts could become audible and
legible for critical appraisal.
From
these two principles Saldívar proposed a third. Using Martí’s “Nuestra América”
as his model, Saldívar dissolved genre hierarchies to argue that the tools of
literary criticism used to interpret the novel, poetry, or drama could also be
applied to Latina/o non-fiction. This additional step opened a new critical
space for interpreting Latina/o literary non-fiction, including its often
critical stance toward the United States and Latin America, as well as its affirmations
of what the U.S. and Latin American literatures have in common. In his own
words,
The greatest shortcoming of the work
being done on the American canon is not its lack of theoretical rigor, but its
parochial vision. Literary historians (even the newer ones) and critics working
on the reconstruction of American literary history characteristically know
little in depth about the history, symbologies, cultures, and discourses of the
Americas. One value of focusing on comparative cultural studies is that it
permits us to escape from the provincial, limiting tacit assumptions that
result from perpetual immersion in studying a single culture or literature. (4)
Thus, in the
tradition of Latin American post-colonial and decolonial criticism, our
anthology seeks to expand on Saldívar’s project by focusing upon urban Latina/o
crónica and literary non-fiction as the most intense and radical expression of
borderlands cosmopolitanism. Like the Birmingham School of cultural studies, it
pursues this critical line stimulate a politics of practical interventions. It
further assumes that the global city, the place where Othered people go to
escape the economic-environmental disaster zones of neoliberal capitalism, embodies
the arena in which they experiment in new humanizing identity projects by continuing
to discover their differences as radical post-national commonalities.
Our focus on urban discourse therefore responds
to the progressive urbanization of society, of human consciousness, and the representations
of this transformation at a time when more than half of the world’s population
lives in cities, and as many as 90 percent of U.S.
Latinas/os live in major urban centers and their adjoining city regions (Pew Hispanic Center n.p.).[3]
Our project echoes the argument Benjamin Fraser makes in his 2015 study Toward
An Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities, which identified the urban
university humanities programs as a new strategic opportunity for democratic
intervention. Fraser also provides a theoretical framework for the linkages we make between urban
spaces and the formal complexities of our non-fiction selection, when he
observes the continuing “disconnect between how humanities scholars engage the
urban and how social scientists view cultural products” (14). Our anthology
follows this notion of, on the one hand, looking at cultural studies from an
urban perspective and, on the other, promoting the methodological integration
of cultural studies research in urban studies and urban studies departments
because, in Fraser’s words,
It
is important to recognize that urban cultural studies research is not limited
to investigating the spaces of cities themselves nor does it treat the built
environment of urban locales in isolation from mental formations or matters of
(urbanized) consciousness. Moreover, urban cultural studies—in the present
formulation—insists on the relevance and value of close readings of cultural
texts, whether those are traditionally literary texts, filmic texts, graphic
novels, popular music forms (albums, songs, etc.), visual representations of
the city (photography, digital media, video games, etc.), or any other concrete
form of urban social practice. (21)
More specifically,
our anthology argues for the Latina/o population’s “right to the city,” to use
the title Henri Lefebvre’s landmark study. We
therefore continue
upon the tangent of critical urban literary theory Raúl Homero Villa’ Barrio-logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Culture had explored sixteen years
earlier to argue that the cultures of cities, the urban consciousness,
and the social contexts and cultural imaginaries of their different ethnic
communities should be considered in planning decisions that influence or
determine urban cultural practices and subjectivities. From this perspective, many
of this anthology’s texts address urban issues that are framed within, expressed,
and thus interpreted from a borderlands perspective that explores institutional
and disciplinary changes that expand the city’s democratic places.
The
2011 publication of Nicolas Kanellos's Hispanic Immigrant Literature: El
Sueno del Retorno, and his preceding
decade of archive construction, offered the other inspiration for
our project. Our anthology focuses on the crónica and other
non-fiction because these genres have always represented the largest source of
Latina/o literary production, as evidenced by Latino documentary history in the United
States holdings at the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. This project, directed by Nicolás Kanellos, focuses on
finding, preserving, and disseminating U.S. Hispanic culture from colonial
times until 1960. It has compiled, microfilmed, and digitized thousands of original
books, pamphlets, manuscripts, archival items, photographs, and personal papers
produced by Latinos in the United States. Significantly, among its holdings is a
microfilm collection of approximately 1,400 historical newspapers from 1801 until the 1960s (listed in Nicolás Kanellos’s Hispanic Periodicals in the
United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography [2000]), which gives us an idea of the scale of U.S. Latina/o non-fiction writing. The
importance of these periodicals must not be underestimated since, as Kallenos
explains, “Almost all Hispanic immigrant newspapers
announced their service in protection of the community in their mastheads and
in editorials, and some of them followed up on this commitment by leading
campaigns to desegregate schools, movie houses, and other facilities and to
construct alternative institutions for the Hispanic community’s use” (Hispanic
Immigrant 36). Moreover, as he reminds us, “Newspapers were the primary
publishers of creative literature and had the most direct impact on the
transmigrants owing to their immediacy and pervasiveness in the communities” (Hispanic
Immigrant 37).
To the cultural production of U.S.
Latinos, we add that of Latin Americans who write from the United States in
their long stays in the country. Viviane Mahieux,
in her study “The
Chronicle,” included in the 2012 Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, lists several
important authors. As could be expected, one of the most celebrated is the
Cuban José Martí, whose New York writings were not collected until 2003 in En los Estados Unidos: Periodismo de 1881–1892 (In the United States:
Journalism from 1881-1892).
As Mahieux explains, during the 1920s the Mexican José
Juan Tablada also
lived in New York, where he wrote his column “Nueva York de
día y de noche” (New York During the Day and at Night) for the Mexico City daily
El Universal. These writings would
later be collected in La
babilonia de hierro, crónicas neoyorkinas (The Iron Babylon, New York Chronicles, 2000). During the 1940s,
she adds, the lesser-known Chilean Rosamel del Valle who also wrote about New
York for a Latin American audience. Fifty of her crónicas were collected in Crónicas de New York (Chronicles of New York, 2002). And,
this time from San Francisco, the Mexican Nobel Prize Laureate Octavio Paz
would write crónicas about the 1945 peace conference included in Crónica Trunca de Días Excepcionales (Truncated Chronicle of Exceptional Days, 2007).
In addition, Mahieux lists Alma
Guillermoprieto’s Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America
(2001), which collects her crónicas about different Latin American countries
and public figures originally published in The New Yorker
and The New York Review of Books. She also cites Diego Fonseca and Aileen El-Kadi’s collection Sam no es mi tío:
Veinticuatro crónicas migrantes y un sueño americano (Sam Is Not My Uncle:
Twenty-four Migrant Chronicles and An American Dream, 2012), with crónicas by the
Peruvian-American Daniel Alarcón, the Mexican Yuri Herrera, and the
Mexican American Ilan Stavans, where they reflect about their experience in the United States.
This anthology proposes, therefore, a
significant re-definition of U.S. Latino literary history, and another model
for English, Spanish, and Latino studies. Along with crónicas, it assembles a
selection of the life-writing genres of memoir and (auto)biography, as well as
of epistolary writing, manifestos, testimonials, political propaganda and other
non-fiction genres, to suggest the arc of Latino thought from assimilationism
to cultural nationalism, and from Mexican nationalist to pan-Latino or
trans-national approaches. As will be seen, U.S. Latino non-fiction writing is
alive and well, with books, among many others, such as Luisa Capetillo’s A Nation Of Women: An Early
Feminist Speaks Out; Mi Opinion Sobre Las Libertades, Derechos y Deberes de la
Mujer, Jesús
Colón’s A Puerto Rican in New York, and
Other Sketches (1961), Piri Thomas’ Down
These Mean Streets (1967), Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy, Richard Rodríguez’s Hunger
of Memory (1982), Cherrie Moraga’s Loving
in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó
por sus labios (Loving in the
War Years: What Never Ran Through Her Lips, 1983),
Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto
Rican (1994), Ray González’s Muy
Macho (1996), Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A
Place To Stand (2001), Carlos Eire’s Waiting
for Snow in Havana (2003), Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004), Sonia Nazario’s newspaper
series Enrique’s Journey (2007), John Rechy’s About My Life and the Kept Woman (2008), Carlos Frías’s Take Me With You (2008), and Reyna Grande’s
The Distance Between Us: A Memoir (2012),
among many others.[4]
Still,
despite all of these achievements, Latina/o crónica
and non-fiction, and a significant body Latina/o literary scholarship on these
genres, have yet to receive their critical due in the national literary cannon.[5] Moreover,
the marginalizing omissions that have disappeared the foundational “literature written in Spanish
on American shores,” Kanellos concludes, “condemn that language and its
speakers to perpetual foreignness and estrangement from the American nation” (Hispanic Immigrant 13). To our
knowledge, there are no book-length studies of the U.S. crónica equivalent to Latin
America’s The Contemporary Mexican
Chronicle. Theoretical Perspectives
on the Liminal Genre, edited by Ignacio Corona and Beth E. Jörgensen, Esperança Bielsa’s The Latin American Urban Crónica: Between Literature
and Mass Culture (2006),
or Viviane Mahieux’s Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared
Intimacy of Everyday Life (2011). One reason for this dearth of criticism is that, as Kanellos
points out, some American critics
assume that first-generation immigrants do not write literature, simply because
they may not write it in English: “in
their introduction the two editors [Payant and Rose] actually articulate their
justification for studying second- and third-generation writers with roots in
the Third World: ‘This reflects the fact that first-generation, non-English
speakers of any nationality seldom produce much literature’ (xxii). It is
precisely this ignorance of an entire corpus of literature that led me to write
this book” (Hispanic Immigrant 11). Kanellos proves the opposite to be
true, at least in the case of Latinas/os in the United States, with the large
amounts of documents, books, and periodicals gathered by the Recovering The
U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, many of them exhibiting the unbroken
link with the pan-Hispanic imaginary. Our anthology shares his conceptual
approach by taking for granted that U.S. Latina/o literature continued to draw
themes, styles, and narrative forms for the same Hispanic tradition that
preceded the U.S. annexation of Mexican territories. It is, therefore, not a
recently born literature and, as Kanellos correctly affirms. Likewise, it would
be mistake to conceive of Chicano, Nuyorican, and Cuban-American literatures as
segregated from one another: “these literatures are all intimately connected to
trans-migrant culture and its literary expression; they must be seen on the
continuum of transnationalism” (Hispanic Immigrant 18).
Regarding
our selection criteria, it is important to note that we
have focused on works that 1) have never appeared in print; 2) have not been
recognized as literary or as pertaining to Latina/o literature; 3) or have not
been recognized as expressive of Latina/o urban subjectivity. The selection of
texts also responds to our goal of providing an inventory of different
non-fiction forms, including both early and twentieth-century crónica,
testimonio, memoir, letters, and examples of performance-inspired experiments
in genre hybridity. Our selection’s rationale also expresses our desire: 1) to test the idea of
an Urban Humanities of social intervention and institutional change; 2) to open
a new line of literary inquiry, and 3) stretch the limits of what can be
considered U.S. Latina/o non-fiction. In the following paragraphs, we shall
point out the significance of each text selected in this critical anthology.
In the
fascinating collection of Jesuit chronicles about the settlement of Baja
California, Crónicas jesuíticas de la
antigua California (Jesuit Chronicles of the Old California, 2000), edited
by Ignacio del Río, we find an insider’s survey of Jesuit activities in the
peninsula from 1697 through 1767 (when Charles III of Spain expelled the
Company of Jesus), as well as of the indigenous groups that populated the area,
living from a hunting, fishing, and gathering mode of subsistence. The
chronicles testify to the Jesuit motivation to evangelize Baja California and
incorporate indigenous groups into the mission system that would transform them
into so many more peasant subjects. The text’s representations of Baja
California (the one that the Spaniards conquered first) give us the spatial
imaginary of Jesuit evangelization. After all, until the nineteenth century,
Spaniards would talk about the Californias, Alta and Baja, as a single geographic
unit. As Ignacio del Río explains, some of the texts, including the one by the
Italian padre Ignacio María Nápoli selected
in our anthology, are cartas de relación
(letters or dispatches with a personal account of the conquest or exploration) explaining
the first contacts with local indigenous groups. Other crónicas focus on the
conversion of the Indians, a particular mission, an ethnographic view of an
indigenous group, indigenous rebellions, or historiographic accounts.
In the
Jesuit crónica included here, we find the European priests’ astonishment upon
their encounter with a completely different culture. First, they are shocked to
find out that one of the tribes, whose men and women are almost completely
naked, has a woman as their ruler. When this indigenous group meets the
Europeans, to the priests’ disbelief, they offer them to sleep with their
wives. According to the chronicler, the Spaniards politely refused the offer.
The chronicler also finds, in this strange (to him) custom, a reason for the
presence of children with European features: he knows of the presence of
English sailors in the area. Napoli, in a Spanish language influenced by his
native Italian that nevertheless shares the Spanish habit of using culinary
metaphor to construct native savagery, also describes Indian eating habits with
disgust: they like to eat lice,
lizards, mice, snakes and other things the Europeans find repulsive. In the end,
when an epidemic decimates the local population, the indigenous groups blame
the Italian padre.
Moving on to nineteenth-century Los
Angeles, one of the first leading Latino voices in Los Angeles journalism was the
teenager Francisco
Ramírez (1837-1908). At the early age of fourteen, he began to work for
the journal Los Angeles Star, which
had a Spanish-language section titled “La
Estrella de Los Angeles.” In 1854, Ramírez became the editor of this
section and in
June 1855, at the age seventeen, he founded and became the editor of the
four-page El Clamor Público (The
Public Outcry), the first Spanish-language weekly newspaper in Los Angeles and the
third newspaper published in the city in any language. A tireless civil rights
activist and outspoken community organizer, his liberal editorials in El Clamor Público condemned slavery, and
advocated for racial equality, the rights of minorities, and the education of
women. He protested
the discrimination and lynching of Hispanics in the United States, and chronicled their odyssey into
the disempowered status of second-class citizens. Until the weekly
journal was closed down on December
31, 1859, the idealistic Ramírez encouraged Hispanics to escape the conservative
world of the Californio ranchero and to participate in the democratic process
by voting. He advised his readership on how to vote on presidential elections,
usually recommending the vote for the Republican Party.
Paul Bryan Gray’s A Clamor for Equality:
Emergence and Exile of Californio Activist Francisco P. Ramirez (2012) points out that Ramírez
alienated most people around him, including Anglos who, sympathizing with
slavery in the South, frowned upon his calls for racial equality for Mexicans,
blacks, Chinese, and Indians, and Mexicans. Gray adds that Ramírez’s
principles, sympathetic to nineteenth-century Mexican, radical liberalism, were
also at odds with the conservative attitudes of Los Angeles’s Mexican community
and with the apathy of most Los Angeles Mexicans toward politics (A Clamor 20).
Regarding his political trajectory,
Ramírez went from a moderate tone that supported the U.S. Constitution’s ideals
and promoted cooperation between Mexicans and Anglos, to a more radical one in
his protests against slavery and racial inequalities. Ramírez went through
other changes in his political views. According to Gray, in 1869 Ramírez became an attorney in
Los Angeles, but eventually had to flee in disgrace to Mexico for his
involvement in a fraudulent certificate of deposit. He died in exile in
Ensenada in 1908 in complete anonymity and the event was ignored in Los
Angeles. Nothing was left of his days as a public figure, a lawyer, and a
socially conscious young editor of La
Estrella de Los Angeles, El Clamor
Público, La Estrella de Occidente,
and El Nuevo Mundo, between the ages
of eighteen to twenty-three (Gray 251).
In the selected crónica, “Folleto notable” (Notable
Leaflet), published in El Clamor Público on
March 19, 1859, Ramírez calls for an alliance between the Latin nations of the
New and the Old World, and more specifically for a Franco-Spanish alliance, to
put an end to the United States’ annexationism and imperialism. Ramírez
demonstrates his awareness of foreign affairs and the foreign press, as well as
his unyielding opposition to U.S. foreign policy. In his view, the clash
between Latin American nations and the United States is not only the embodiment
of the dichotomy civilization and barbarism, but also a racial and religious
war that began in Europe during the Reformation. Like José Martí, Ramírez warns
against the Americans’ insatiable thirst for territorial conquest and cites. The
only way to save civilization, he assures, is the aforementioned alliance of
the “Latin races.” This selection also
suggests much about his relationship to his French neighbor and
mentor, Jean-Louis Vignes, and probably the reason Ramírez attained an
impressive command of literary French in three Clamor editions he published to
attract the city’s French readers.
Another
icon of transnational U.S. Latino crónica is Ricardo Flores Magón (1873-1922), editor and founder of Regeneración. He was born in Oaxaca,
Mexico, and spent the last eighteen years of his life in exile in the United
States, after the Mexican government forbade him to publish in Mexico. Having
devoted part of his life to fomenting armed struggle against Porfirio Díaz
throughout the northern states of Mexico, Flores Magón is considered today one
of the intellectual forefathers and precursors of the Mexican Revolution, and
an important figure of international anarchism. His political ideology was
published mostly in the journals El hijo
de El Ahuizote and Regeneración,
where he often expressed his disagreement with Francisco I. Madero’s political
goals; as an anarchist, he was determined to eradicate both the State and
private property. The continuing efforts to reconstruct the Magonista archive
in the U.S., above all Southern California, offers new evidence of the
transnational reach of Mexican anarchism in the history of the Chicana/o left.[6]
Ernesto Galarza’s classic autobiography, Barrio
Boy, confirms, via recollected testimonies of exiled workers, the way the revolution’s
narratives and rhetoric echoed in the Mexican labor agitation of the Sacramento
area.
In the crónica included in this
anthology, “La repercusión de un linchamiento” (The Repercussion of a
Lynching), published in Regeneración
on November 12, 1910, Flores Magón denounces the lynching of Hispanics in the
United States, which was often condemned in the early Spanish-language
chronicle. He also condemns the U.S. support to dictators such as the
Guatemalan Manuel Estrada Cabrera and the Mexican Porfirio Díaz, as well as
their intervention in the internal politics of several Latin American
countries. Although he resists blaming the U.S. people directly, he nevertheless
denounces the greedy owners greedy of its multinational companies and the mistreatment
and oppression of Mexicans in the United States. More specifically, he
condemns, like Guerrero in “Blancos, blancos,” the lynching of the Mexican
citizen Antonio Rodríguez, who was burned alive after being accused (without a
court case) of killing an American woman in Rock Springs, Texas. Flores Magón turns
the tragedy to his own political uses by blaming not the lynching crowd, but
capitalism itself, which, he argues, has divided “the two races that populate
this beautiful continent” (meaning Anglos and Latinos).[7]
Interestingly, this approach perhaps anticipates the critique of “race” as a
social construct.
Switching to life-writing, our anthology
includes an excerpt of the unpublished memoirs of Alfredo Cobos, Victor Valle’s grandfather. Cobos’s recollection of the
Mexican Revolution begins when he was pressed into service in the winter of 1916
by José Inés Salazar, the last of the magonista rebel generals. The memoir thus
offers echoes the magonista anarchism in Southern California. Family and
friends who enjoyed the various oral performances of Alfredo’s recollections
will use it to construct a number of contradictory meanings. Some added his
narrative to the other which they recruited in their efforts to fight for
Mexican and Chicano civil rights; others interpreted his guile and endurance as
evidence of an inherited spirit of entrepreneurship; still others saw the
pointless destruction of a failed revolution. On another level, however, Cobos’s
Spanish-language memoir, which he orally related to his also immigrant wife,
Matilde, is an Hispanic immigrant text, which Kanellos defines as “the
literature created orally or in written form by immigrants from the Hispanic
world who have come to U.S. shores since the early nineteenth century” (Hispanic
Immigrant 7). Read now, his memoir suggests a recurring theme in Latina/o
literature. The landscape Cobos describes with such intimate knowledge of its
place meanings is remembered in another place. For many Mexican and other
Latina/o immigrants and their U.S. descendants, the memory of this trauma becomes
unbearably poignant whenever the danger of displacement or expulsion threaten
their attempts to stake claims to place or citizenship.
Anaïs Nin (born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell,
1903–1977), has
not been traditionally identified as a Latina. She was born to privileged
Catalan-Cuban parents in France, where she was raised, and spent some time in
Spain and Cuba, but lived most of her life in the United States (New York and
Los Angeles) where she became a writer. The selected excerpts are taken from
her journal writing while Nin lived in Los Angeles, the city where she died.
She began writing her journals, to which she owes her writing fame, at age
eleven and would continue writing them until her death. She also published three
novels, a five-volume roman-fleuve or continuous novel, short stories,
essays, erotica written during the early 1940s, three novellas, and critical
studies, much of which was published posthumously. Her writing was influenced
by Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Yet surprisingly, Nin remains absent from
anthologies of Los Angeles Hispanic writing and U.S. Latino writing in general,
while retaining her literary purchase as an important feminist precursor. Marisela
Norte, for example, acknowledges the influence of Nin’s journaling style in her
poetic diaries of Los Angeles bus riding (Rachmuhl: 82 and 230). Nin’s views of
Los Angeles move from the stereotypical image of the city toward a more personal
attachment with the place where she lived for long periods of her life. Nin never denies her
connections of Hispanic culture. Her upbringing in Spain and Cuba and her
frequent trips to Mexico are recurring reference points in her diary, as is her
struggle with Spanish Catholicism. Her diaries of gay, bisexual and
heterosexual experimentation precede and complement John Rechy’s, each “sexual
outlaws” of their respective times. Her 1966 L.A. Free Press review of a UCLA screening of Jean Genet’s 1950 sexually
explicit short film Un chant D’Amour (Song of Love), in celebrating the
surrealist poet’s overtly homoerotic aesthetic (and which a U.S. Supreme Court
decision banned from commercial circulation), is among those that open
expressive space for gay and feminist artists (Green & Karolides: 96-97).
Our next selection focuses on Bert
Corona, one of the most prominent members of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense
Committee and present day founders of the immigrant rights movement. We learn
in Corona’s recollections –related to Jesus Mena in the testimonio form Cuba’s Miguel Barnet and Mexico’s Elena Poniatowska
devised to reverse the cronica’s
appropriations of subaltern’s voices – that this community activist,
labor organizer, and organic
intellectual was another child of the Mexican Revolution shaped in the Depression’s
labor struggles. It is his not-so-disguised formation in the left politics of
the pre- and post-War era that will color his recollections of the
notorious Sleepy Lagoon case. As Raúl
Homero Villa acutely states, this is an example of a text that offers “longer views of
historical presence and struggles for place-rights that have helped construct
the social space of ethnicity among working-class barrio residents” (Barrio-Logos 110). In Bert Corona’s testimonio,
he recalls the 1970s as an exciting period in which he nevertheless
perceived the limits of Chicano cultural nationalism and anticipated an
immigrant Latina/o working class majority’s turn toward an urban, place-based politics
of class struggle. Along these lines, Laura Pulido, reflecting on Corona and
Los Angeles’s Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), writes that: “Former
members of CASA had not only created a network of like-minded people but seeds
of resistance within the ‘old’ labor movement that would blossom with the
advent of greater institutional support” (Black, Brown 221). These
seeds, she argues, would bear fruit in the 1990s, when former CASA members
trained under Corona assumed pivotal leadership positions within the local and
national labor movement, the legal arm of the immigrant rights movement, and
the political class that began to reshape the Los Angeles’s political culture.
Rather than simply responding to the material conditions of the late 1970s,
their practice would create the conditions for another struggle, the one that
reappeared to fill the streets of Los Angeles and other major cities in 2006.
Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004),
a
sixth-generation tejana, is best known for her 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a seminal text in Border
Studies, as well as Chicana, feminist, and queer cultural theory. Questioning
binaries by mixing poetry and prose, English, Spanish, Nahuatl and Caló, autobiography, testimonio, history and myth, in Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa
explores, from the perspective of a lesbian Chicana and border person, the
socio-cultural marginalization and displacement of Mexican Americans in the
international border between Mexico and Texas as well as the experience of
living in two cultural and linguistic realities at once. In her selection, “Border
Arte. Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera,” an essay written for the catalog of
the 1993 exhibit La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States
Border Experience, organized in
San Diego by the Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary
Art San Diego, Anzaldúa explores what it means to be a border Chicana/o artist,
after visiting an exhibit that featured a display of the Coyolxauhqui monolith unearthed in
1978. Here she addresses the tension between today’s border hybridity and
Chicano cultural nationalism’s militaristic version of the Mexican pre-Columbian
past. Anzaldúa resorts to the Nahuatl term nepantla
(meaning between or in the middle) to define the liminal existence of
Chicana/o artists on the border through an alternative interrogation of
Mesoamerican gender. But her purpose is larger than that: This essay explores
the possibilities of a “mestiza” indigeneity no longer rooted in nationalist
Mexican or Chicano patrias.
Helena
María Viramontes (1954-) was born in East Los Angeles
to Mexican American parents who still kept an immigrant outlook, as she stated
in the selected text. She is currently a professor of creative writing in the
Department of English at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, New York.
Viramontes has published the collection of short stories The Moths and Other
Stories (1985), and the novels Under the Feet of
Jesus (1995) and Their Dogs Came with
Them (2007).
In “Beach Blanket Baja,”
published in the New York Times on August 16, 2008, she reminisces about her life in the underprivileged East Los Angeles
of the 1950s and 1960s and about her mother’s fears while crossing the
international border into the United States, even though she was an American
citizen.
The first two chapters of Alejandro
Murguía’s Medicine of Memory give
us one of the best Chicano memoir critiques of the San Fernando Missions and of
Fray Junípero Serra and the other Franciscan cronistas. His excerpt provides
this anthology with a sense of unity via dialectic negation and the cronica’s
genre continuities, a moment in which the reader discovers a long ignored
Chicano dialogue with seventeenth century writing, and a crucial moment to
capture a three-hundred-year literary genealogy.
Harry Gamboa Jr. (1951-) is
a Chicano essayist, photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist. Along with Gronk (Glugio Nicandro), Willie Herrón and Patssi Valdez, he co-funded
Chicano performance
artist collective ASCO (1972-1987; the word Spanish word
“asco” means “disgust” or “revulsion”), which reacted against the socioeconomic
and political oppression of the Chicano community, particularly in the East Los
Angeles (where Gamboa grew up) of the 1970s and 1980s. ASCO also challenged the
marginalization of Chicano artists from Los Angeles’s art world with its now
infamous Los
Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
installations. In 1972, for instance, they protested through their “Spray Paint
LACMA,” a graffiti in which they spray painted their names, Herron (Willie Herrón III), Gamboa (Harry
Gamboa Jr) and Gronkie (Gronk), outside the LACMA, which is famously depicted
in a photograph Harry Gamboa Jr. snapped the following day of Patssi Valdez furtively
looking away by the three names. As Max Benavidez explains in his 2007 book Gronk, the piece was a reaction to Gamboa Jr.’s meeting with the
LACMA curator, who assured him that Chicanos only did folk art, not fine art: “Gamboa reported this to his Asco cohorts,
and they decided that if their work would not be exhibited, they would sign the
museum and call it—the whole publicly
funded museum, including bricks and mortar and everything inside—their artwork”
(38). ASCO’s multi-genre performances and conceptual art in
public areas of Los Angeles responded to the marginalization of the Chicano
urban community and the violence it suffered.
As a
high-school student, Gamboa participated in the 1968 “East L.A. Blowouts” to protest the
deplorable conditions of public schools in the area. His work tends to reflect
the alienation of Chicano life and to denounce white hegemony. The setting of
his art is usually urban. Among his most significant works, are the mail art of
the 1970s, ASCO’s “no movies” (Tumor Hats [1973], First Supper (After a Major Riot)/Instant Mural [1974],
Cruel Profit [1974]: Á
La Mode [1976], and Search
and No Seizure, La Dolce, Waiting For Tickets [1978]), and the “urban operas” Ignore the Dents and Jetter’s
Jinx.
In “Light at the End of the Tunnel Vision,” from Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry
Gamboa Jr. (University
of Minnesota Press, 1998) in which he contextualizes the book’s photographs and
other visual texts. As Richard T. Rodriguez points out in his review of
the book, the essay “Light at the End of Tunnel Vision,” Gamboa “recounts how
he was inspired to create the series of photographs entitled Chicano Male
Unbonded upon hearing a news announcer on his car radio declare: ‘Be on the
lookout for a Chicano male. He is probably armed and very dangerous to society’”
(140). Gamboa exposes the media’s bias against the Mexican American community
and how this affects their self-esteem: “Millions of Chicanos are ignored,
stereotyped, and denied by the mass media of television, cable TV, radio,
Hollywood movies, popular magazines, educational curriculum textbooks, and a
new generation of personal computer‑based multimedia software” (Urban 99). On the other hand, in his
view, Chicanos had become a phantom presence (or absence) in Los Angeles and he
was determined to document their presence in the urban environment with his
photography.
Guillermo
Gómez-Peña (1955-)
was born in Mexico City and moved to the United States in 1978. From 1983 through 1990, he
lived in the San Diego/Tijuana border region, an experience that would
influence his cultural production, often concerned with border culture and
politics. A
performance writer, artist, and activist, he has worked, like Harry Gamboa,
with different media, including performance, installation, photography, video,
and experimental radio. With the selection in this anthology, we attempt to underscore
the the importance of the post- or non-mimetic stance of his performance art. Gómez-Peña
has published poetry, essays, performance scripts, he chronicles in English,
Spanish, and a combination of the two languages.[8]
We have selected texts Guillermo
Gómez-Peña wrote while he lived in Los Angeles, a geographic fact (writing from
the heart of a global metropolis) that is reflected in the author’s
positionality. We can contrast his gaze to the imperial turn-of-the-century
railroad barons who oversaw their industrial domains, to the west and to the
south to Mexico, from a then emergent industrial metropole. Gómez-Peña’s, by
contrast, looks out more than a century later from the metropole of neoliberal
globalization, to critically assess the result of that imperial trajectory. Stylistically,
as with Gamboa, we are looking at a flânerie
from below. Each of these pieces, in commenting upon and describing a
theatrical event, establishes the performance as an actual empirical event,
which he “reports” on and interprets through his non-fiction meta-narrative,
hence his position as a postmodern flâneur.
Nylsa Martínez (Mexicali, 1979-)
lives in Los Angeles. She
was a member of the narrative workshop of the department of literary studies of
the Universidad de Guadalajara until 2006. She is the author of the short story collections Roads (Paraíso Perdido 2007) and Tu casa
es mi casa (CONACULTA and ICBC 2009). In “Lights,” Nylsa Martínez remember how much
easier it was, in the 1980s, to cross the border for any reason. She recalls
her childhood memories of trips to Disneyland and Los Angeles. At first, her
visits would not meet her expectations. She remembers her family getting lost
in the freeway and those memories blend with the present experience in the
city, still the same mirage of her childhood. In the present time, one day she
enters a restaurant called Mexicali, like her hometown, but cannot recognize
the food in the menus. That is, in her view, one of the idiosyncrasies of Los
Angeles: nothing is what it appears to be.
Sesshu
Foster (1957) has taught composition and
literature in several American universities. He has published American
Loneliness: Selected Poems (Beyond Baroque, 2006); the
experimental prose poem City Terrace Field Manual (Kaya/Muae1996); the
novel Atomic Aztex (City Lights, 2005); and the poetry collection
World Ball Notebook (City Lights, 2008). In the selected text, Foster
plays with the contrasts between lived reality in Los Angeles, and particularly
in East. L.A., and the filmographic renditions of it Hollywood exports to the
world. In an effort to acknowledge a Latina/o writing aesthetic that transcend
questions of ethnic or racial authenticity, Foster writes about L.A. in an
overtly Latino style, including the use of code switching, instead of the
ethnographic gaze that dominates the film representation. He can be considered
a Latino author through social proximity via lived culture, and his
identification with East L.A. and Chicano issues is obvious even in his
personal website.
The journalist and author
Rubén Martínez (1962-) was born in Los Angeles, a city that is the focus of
many of his writings, along with other topics such as globalization,
immigration, and Central American and Mexican politics and culture. He has
published the books The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City &
Beyond (Vintage, 1993); East Side Stories (with Joseph
Rodriguez, 1998); Crossing Over: A Mexican Family over the Migrant Trail
(2001), where he follows the trials and tribulations of several migrant Mexican
families on their way to and across the United States, seeing three of migrants
die in an accident while fleeing the Border Patrol along with many other
hardships; The New Americans (2004), where Martínez explores, through the
stories of seven families from different countries, how immigrants are changing
the United States as well as changing U.S. views of immigrants; Flesh Life:
Sex in Mexico (with Joseph Rodriguez, 2006); and Desert America:
Boom and Bust in the New Old West (2012), dealing with neglected communities,
extreme poverty, and ecological disasters in the southwest of the United
States. Martínez was the first Latino staff member of LA Weekly, and he has also worked for National Public Radio. As a
television host for the show Life &
Times, he won an Emmy Award. Martínez has taught at Loyola
Marymount University in Los Angeles, University
of Houston, University
of California, Santa Barbara, and Claremont McKenna
College. Martínez has received the Lannan
Foundation fellowship, the Loeb Fellowship from
Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, the "Freedom of
Information Award," the "Greater Press Club of Los Angeles Award of
Excellence," and an Emmy Award. In “My Father’s House,” Martínez displays
his strong sense of place, as he discusses the gentrification of Silver Lake
district of Los Angeles, where he grew up. Today a haven for hipsters, Silver
Lake, as Martínez explains, used to be a multiethnic enclave for working class
and immigrant residents, and a boasted a bohemian scene with expatriate
artists, activists and intellectuals, as well as gay and lesbian neighbors: “Ultimately, of
course, the arrival of the hipsters (and their elders, the ones with the real
money) drove out the immigrant working class altogether, leaving only a faint
aura in old signage preserved by the newcomers for authenticity’s sake” (n.p.).
As will
be seen, some of these texts echo those moments in the 1970s when the rupture
between Chicano Cultural Nationalism on the one hand and the
urban Latina/o immigrant rights movement and borderlands literature on the
other took place. The massive arrival of new Latin American immigrants (mostly
Mexican and Central American) changed the sociocultural reality of Los Angeles
and other cities.
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Notes
[1] The Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board lists Raymund A. Paredes as the Texas Commissioner of Higher
Education
(http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/index.cfm?objectid=FBE1507F-C5D0-FC95-369EF7AC883B5F24).
The biography posted on the commission’s web page states that “Dr. Paredes
spent most of his academic career at UCLA where for 30 years he taught as an
English professor and served for ten years as vice chancellor for Academic
Development. In addition, he served as special assistant to the president of
the University of California System in outreach efforts to improve access to
higher education for students from educationally disadvantaged communities”
(n.p.).
[2] Ernesto Galarza, intellectual architect of the United Farm Workers
movement and author of the classic autobiography, Barrio Boy, questioned the wisdom of building a Chicano Studies
academic project based on an ethnic construct when he said: “I don’t think it leads very far, because if
you look at these terms – you’ll find people who are called Chicanos in San
Jose; they’re called Chicanos in Imperial Valley; they’re called Chicanos in
San Francisco. But if you know those people, the occupational differences are
more important, to me, anyway. It may be because I have a certain bias against
ethnic identity. I don’t think people should be handled that way . . .
should be catalogued . . . because it’s not a permanent characteristic
other than to those who believe in very strong racial, ethnic characteristics –
and I don’t.” (1982, n.p.)
[3] According to the 2010 US
census, more than half of the Latina/o population
(with a total of 50.5
million or 16 percent of the US population) lived
in California, Texas, and Florida.
[4] Although
the aforementioned texts and authors have received more critical attention, we
believe a future second volume would complete the invaluable work of fully
illustrating the literature’s scope and critical architecture.
[5] There are important studies on
Spanish-language journalism in the United States by Ramón D. Chacón, Juan Gonzales and
Richard Griswold del Castillo, among others;
on testimonial writing, such as Rosaura Sánchez’s Telling Identities. The Californio
Testimonios (1995), a discourse analysis of
group identity formation in thirty
1870s testimony from the original Spanish-speaking settlers of Alta California;
or on political writing, such as Juan Gómez-Quiñones’s Las ideas políticas de Ricardo Flores Magón
(1977) and Paul Bryan Gray’s A Clamor for
Equality: Emergence and Exile of Californio Activist Francisco P. Ramírez (2012). Yet, because the
above-mentioned works ignore or de-emphasize these writings as aesthetic forms
or performances, and over-determine their meaning as informational content, much
more work still needs to be done on U.S. Latino non-fiction, particularly when
written in Spanish.
[6] “Los chicanos participaron en la revolución
mexicana a través de la actividad del PLM, mientras al mismo tiempo tomaban
parte en el movimiento radical de Estados Unidos” (14).
[8] He is also a founding member of the art collective Border
Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo and serves as director of the
performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra. Among his performance art pieces are
the following: “The Couple in the Cage (with Coco Fusco, 1992-93), “The Crucifiction
Project” (with Roberto Sifuentes, 1994), “Temple of Confessions” (1995), “The
Mexterminator Project” (1997–99),The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities,
(1999-2002), the “Mapa/Corpo” series (2004-2009), Corpo Ilicito (2010-2011),
and recently Corpo Insurrecto (2012-2013).
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